The Island of Faith Part 5

Suddenly, as if in answer to his spoken name, there came a scuffling sound from the corner where Pa was sleeping. All at once the empty bottle dropped from the unclenched hand, the mouth fell open in a prodigious yawn, the eyes became wide, burned-out wells of drunkenness. And as she watched, Rose-Marie saw the room cleared in an amazing fashion. She heard Mrs. Volsky's terrified whisper, "He's wakin' up!" She heard Jim's harsh laugh; she saw Ella, with a fiercely maternal sweep of her strong arms, gather the little Lily close to her breast and dart toward the inner room. And then, as she stood dazedly watching the mountain of sodden flesh that was Pa rear itself to a sitting posture, and then to a standing one, she felt a hot little hand touch her own.

"We better clear out," said the voice of Bennie. "We better clear out pretty quick! Pa's awful bad, sometimes, when he's just wakin' up!"

With a quickness not unlike the b.u.mp at the end of a falling-through-s.p.a.ce dream, Rose-Marie felt herself drawn from the room--heard the door close with a slam behind her. And then she was hurrying after the shadowy form of Bennie, down the five rickety flights of stairs--past the same varied odours and the same appalling sounds that she had noticed on the way up!

VIII

ANOTHER QUARREL

When Rose-Marie came out into the sunlight of the street she glanced at her watch and saw, with an almost overwhelming surprise, that it was only four o'clock. It was just an hour since she had entered the cavern-like doorway of the tenement. But in that hour she had come, for the first time, against life in the rough. She had seen degeneracy, and poverty, and--she was thinking of the expression in Jim's eyes--a menace that she did not at all understand. She had seen the waste of broken middle age and the pity of blighted childhood. She had seen fear and, if she had stayed a few moments longer, she would have seen downright brutality. Her hand, reaching out, clutched Bennie's hand.

"Dear," she said--and realized, from the startled expression of his eyes, that he had not often been called "Dear,"--"is it always like that, in your home?"

Bennie looked up into her eyes. He seemed, somehow, younger than he had appeared the day before, younger and softer.

"Yes, Miss," he told her, "it's always like that, except when it's worse!"

"And," Rose-Marie was still asking questions, "do your older sister and brother just drift in, at any time, like that? And is your father home in the middle of the day? Don't any of them work?"

Bennie's barriers of shyness had been burned away by the warmth of her friendship. He was in a mood to tell anything.

"Pa, he works sometimes," he said. "An' Ella--she uster work till she had a fight with her boss last week. An' now she says she ain't gotta work no more 'cause there's a feller as will give her everythin' she wants, if she says th' word! An' Jim--I ain't never seen him do nothin', but he always has a awful lot o' money. He must do his workin' at night--after I'm asleep!"

Rose-Marie, her mind working rapidly, realized that Bennie had given revelations of which he did not even dream. Pa--his condition was what she had supposed it to be--but Ella was drifting toward danger-shoals that she had never imagined! Well she knew the conditions under which a girl of Ella's financial status stops working--she had heard many such cases discussed, with an amazing frankness, during her short stay at the Settlement House. And Jim--Jim with his sleek, patent-leather hair, and his rat-like face--Jim did his work at night! Rose-Marie could not suppress the shudder that ran over her. Quickly she changed the subject to the one bright spot in the Volsky family--to Lily.

"Your little sister," she asked Bennie, "has she always been as she is now? Wasn't there ever a time when she could hear, or speak, or see?"

Bennie winked back a suspicion of tears before he answered. Rose-Marie, who found herself almost forgetting the episode of the kitten, liked him better for the tears. "Yes, Miss," he told her, "she was born all healthy, Ma says. But she had a sickness--when she was a baby. An' she ain't been right since!"

They walked the rest of the way in silence--a silence of untold depth.

But it was that silent walk, Rose-Marie felt afterward, that cemented the strange affection that had sprung suddenly into flower between them. As they said good-bye, in front of the brownstone stoop of the Settlement House, there was none of the usual restraint that exists between a child and a grown-up. And when Rose-Marie asked Bennie, quite as a matter of course, to come to some of their boys' clubs he a.s.sented in a manner as casual as her own.

As she sat down to dinner, that night, Rose-Marie was beaming with happiness and the pride of achievement. The Superintendent, tired after the day's work, noticed her radiance with a wearily sympathetic smile--the Young Doctor, coming in briskly from his round of calls, was aware of her pink cheeks and her sparkling eyes. All at once he realized that Rose-Marie was a distinct addition to the humdrum life of the place; that she was like a sweet old-fashioned garden set down in the gardenless slums. He started to say something of the sort before he remembered that a quarrel lay, starkly, between them.

Rose-Marie, herself, could scarcely have told why she was so bubbling over with gladness. When she left the tenement home of the Volskys she had been exceedingly depressed, when she parted from Bennie at the Settlement House steps she had been ready to cry. But the hours between that parting and dinnertime had brought her a sort of a.s.surance, a sort of joyous bravery. She felt that at last she had found her true vocation, her real place in the sun. The Volsky family presented to her a very genuine challenge.

She glanced, covertly, at the Young Doctor. He was eating soup, and no man is at his best while eating soup. And yet as she watched him, she considered very seriously whether she should tell him of her adventure.

His skill might, perhaps, find some way out for Lily, who had not been born a mute, who had come into the world with seeing eyes. Bennie had told her that the child's condition was the result of an illness. Perhaps the Young Doctor might be able to effect at least a partial cure. Perhaps it was selfish of her--utterly, absurdly selfish, to keep the situation to herself.

The Superintendent's voice broke, sharply, into her reverie. It was a pleasant voice, and yet Rose-Marie found herself resenting its questioning tone.

"Did you have a pleasant afternoon, dear?" the Superintendent was asking.

"I noticed that you were out for a long while, alone!"

"Why, yes," Rose-Marie faltered, as she spoke, and, to her annoyance, she could feel the red wave of a blush creeping up over her face (Rose-Marie had never learned to control her blushes). "Why, yes, I had a very delightful afternoon!"

The Young Doctor, glancing up from his soup, felt a sudden desire to tease. Rose-Marie, with her cheeks all flushed, made a startlingly colourful, extremely young picture.

"You're blushing!" he told her accusingly. "You're blushing!"

Rose-Marie, feeling the blushes creep still higher, knew a rude impulse to slap the Young Doctor. All of her desire to confide in him died away, as suddenly as it had been born. He was the man who had said that the people who lived in poverty are soulless. He would scoff at the Volskys, and at her desire to help them. Worse than that--he might keep her from seeing the Volskys again. And, in keeping her from seeing them, he would also keep her from making Bennie into a real, wholesome boy--he would keep her from showing Ella the dangers of the precipice that she was skirting. Of course, he might help Lily. But, Rose-Marie told herself that perhaps even Lily--golden-haired, angelic little Lily--might seem soulless to him.

"I'm not blushing, Dr. Blanchard," she said shortly, and could have bitten her tongue for saying it.

The Young Doctor laughed with a boyish vigour.

"I thought," he said annoyingly, "that you were a Christian, Miss Rose-Marie Thompson!"

Rose-Marie felt a tide of quite definite anger rising in her heart.

"I am a Christian!" she retorted.

"Then," the Young Doctor was still laughing, "then you must never, never tell untruths. You are blushing!"

The Superintendent interrupted. It had been her role, lately, to interrupt quarrels between the two who sat on either side of her table.

"Don't tease, Billy Blanchard!" she said, sternly. "If Rose-Marie went anywhere this afternoon, she certainly had a right to. And she also has a right to blush. I'm glad, in these sophisticated days, to see a girl who can blush!"

The Young Doctor was leaning back in his chair, surveying the pair of them with unconcealed amus.e.m.e.nt.

"How you women do stick together!" he said. "Talk about men being clannish! I believe," he chuckled, "from the way Miss Thompson is blushing, that she's got a very best beau! I believe that she was out with him, this afternoon!"

Rose-Marie, who had always been taught that deceit is wicked, felt a sudden, unexplainable urge to be wicked! She told herself that she hated Dr. Blanchard--she told herself that he was the most unsympathetic of men! His eyes, fixed mirthfully upon her, brought words--that she scarcely meant to say--to her lips.

"Well," she answered slowly and distinctly, "what if I was?"

There was silence for a moment. And then--with something of an effort--the Superintendent spoke.

"I told you," she said, "not to bother Rose-Marie, Doctor. If Rose-Marie was out with a young man I'm sure that she had every right to be.

Rose-Marie"--was it possible that her eyes were fixed a shade inquiringly upon the blushing girl--"would have nothing to do with any one who had not been approved by her aunts. And she realizes that she is, in a way, under my care--that I am more or less responsible for her safety and welfare. Rose-Marie is trustworthy, absolutely trustworthy. And she is old enough to take care of herself. You must not bother her, Billy Blanchard!"

It was a long speech for the Superintendent, and it was a kindly one. It was also a speech to invite confidences. But--strangely enough--Rose-Marie could not help feeling that there was a question half concealed in the kindliness of it. She could not help feeling that the Superintendent was just a trifle worried over the prospect of an unknown young man.

It was her time, then, to admit that there was n.o.body, really--that she had gone out on an adventure by herself, that there had been no "beau."

But the consciousness of the Young Doctor's eyes, fixed upon her face, prohibited all speech. She could not tell him about the Volskys--neither could she admit that no young man was interested in her. Every girl wants to seem popular in the eyes of some member of the opposite s.e.x--even though that member may be an unpleasant person--whom she dislikes. And so, with a feeling of utter meanness in her soul--with a real weight of deceit upon her heart--she smiled into the Superintendent's anxious face.

"I do appreciate the way you feel about me," she said softly, "I do, indeed! You may be sure that I won't do anything that either you, or my aunts, would disapprove of!"

After all, she a.s.sured herself a trifle uncomfortably, she had in no way told a direct falsehood. They had a.s.sumed too much and she had not corrected their a.s.sumptions. She said fiercely, in her heart, that she was not to blame if they insisted upon taking things for granted!